Expert: Marilyn - 12/26/2009

Question
QUESTION: Hello Marilyn,

I hope all things are well with you, things are great over here, just getting ready for the Big feast this Thursday,lol

I do have another question for you as always, My question comes into the scripture Acts 7:45 "Which also our fathers that came after brought in with Jesus into the possession of the Gentiles, whom God drave out before the face of our fathers, unto the days of David", now in a discussion about this scripture, a person asks who is this Jesus? I know from studying the Bible that this verse is taken from the King James Version, all other versions correctly use the name Joshua, as this is who it is speaking about, but my question is are the names Joshua and Jesus synonymous?? Since the Greek transliterates Joshua and Jesus with Lesous, are they one in the same? Because as we know from scripture also that God gave Jesus a name above all names,Phillipians 2:9-11 "9Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
     and gave him the name that is above every name,
10that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
     in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
11and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
     to the glory of God the Father." And is that name Jesus? That is the name above all names? The person in our discussion says no because the name Jesus/Joshua was a common name during those times so it couldnt have been Jesus or in Aramaic Yeshua.

I humbly thank you in advance and hope you have a wonderful and blessed Thanksgiving.

Junior

ANSWER: Hello Junior;

Yes, Yeshua, which in English is Joshua and Jesus (Iesus according to some) in Greek, was a popular name back in the day--still is. But lots of Spanish speaking people name their children "Jesus" with the Spanish "j" sounding like an "h" coming out like Hey-zeus phonetically. So, does that mean that people will bow to all these young men named Jesus? How many boys and young men do you know named Joshua? Does that mean everybody is going to bow down to them? Obviously not, compared to the Son of God, all these fellows with the same name are just a bunch of low-down sinners.

Clearly, the Name is important not because of the Name specifically, but because of Who bore the Name and what He did!  

Elohim is the Name translated "God" in Genesis 1:1 and throughout the Bible. Elohim, lower case "e," is also the name given to hosts of angels. The reason for this is because it indicates heavenly beings and more than one in a unified form. This name is often confused with Elohim--God--especially in Psalm 8 and Hebrews 1:7 where it says "a little lower than angels." Well, human beings were created god-class beings, that is, each given an eternal speaking spirit with free will, self-consciousness, moral consciousness and god-like talents of mathematics, physics, music, art, literature, etc. We're not created a little lower than the angels, we're created a little lower than God. Angels are servants of God and because we're His children, our servants too, see the rest of Hebrews 1. Plenty of opportunity for confusion abounds.

Clearly, there has to be more to it than the Name. At the Name of Jesus, the God/Man who died on cross and rose again from the dead, every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that He is Lord. All those other Joshuas, Jesuses are simply blessed to share such a fabulous name. None merits such adoration as the Son of God, Revelation 5.

For more confusion (or clarification) on the matter:

http://www.messianic.com/articles/yeshua.htm

http://www.thenazareneway.com/yeshua_jesus_real_name.htm

http://jesusisajew.org/YESHUA.php

Some people seem to think Christ is Jesus' last Name. "Christ" is Greek for Ha'Mashiach which means "The Anointed One." Kenneth Copeland adds: the Anointed One and His Anointing. I don't know if this is accurate in the Hebrew or not, but it makes a person think. In English Ha'Mashiach is Messiah. So if you were talking about Jesus in Hebrew you would say: Yeshua Ha'Mashiach. I think that sounds like Ye-shoe-a Ha-Ma-she-ach. This site has the Name spoken for you: http: //www.hebrew4christians.net/Names_of_G-d/Yeshua/yeshua.html

But apparently it's not a terribly big deal to God as long as we don't take what we understand to be His Name in vain. His Name, YHWH, or YHVH, depending on who you're talking to, is lost--all we have are the consonants. The Jews refused to pronounce the Name, so when they wrote it they either left off the little marks that indicate vowels or replaced them with the vowels from Adonai. The Name was not uttered except by the High Priest when he entered the Holy of Holies three times once a year. As far as I know, God hasn't bothered to clarify exactly what His Name is since it was lost back sometime around 70 A.D. when the Jewish temple was destroyed and the people scattered.

While Jesus may not mind being called Iesus or Jesus or Joshua or Yeshua, our attitude and personal relationship with Him and with YHWH is all important. Whatever Name He is called, it is to Him we will bow, it is to Him we look to for salvation. He is Lord.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Sincerely,

Marilyn

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Greetings Marilyn and Happy Holidays,

Hope all is well, someone came up to me and asked me a question concerning this scripture, "But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father."

Now they say this scripture proves that Jesus could not be God because it says here that not even the Son knoweth, but only the Father, my question to you is, how would I answer this?? I am not sure how and am writing to you in hopes that you can help me, I thank you in advance, and ask that you also keep me in prayer as I will soon be having major shoulder surgery in January.

Junior


Answer
Hello Junior;

Yes, I'll pray for you. Dear Lord Jesus, I praise You and bless You and give You glory. Be with Junior, comfort him and make your Presence known to him in a new and deeper way. Give the surgeons revelation knowledge, restful sleep and steady hands. Cause the doctors and nurses to do excellent work. And Lord, heal Junior according to your Word which says, "By Jesus wounds we have been healed." Praise you and thank you. I ask these things in Jesus' Name. Amen.

Jesus emptied Himself taking on the form of a servant to become a Man, Philippians 2:7. As a Man, Jesus knew only what the Holy Spirit told Him and as a Man He was on a need-to-know basis, same as we are. That's the short answer.

Now for the long answer:

Man's tradition says that God in His Omniscience knows the future as a done deal. This is how "predestination" has been interpreted beginning with Calvin. But few think of what this means--not just for us, but for God. It would mean God's hands are ever bit as tied as our hands are. We just play out a script and He's the only one who can read it, but being able to read it, He can't change it.

As far as I've been able to determine, Paul is the only writer of biblical material who has ever come close to seeming to make this assertion, this assertion that the future is a done deal. The word he used, "proorizo," which is translated as "predestine," literally means "pre-horizon."

Another way to interpret the word is God sees a horizon and sets boundaries. A boundary and a done deal are not very similar! It's not that God knows the future as a done deal, but He sees things on the horizon and creates a boundary--like a fence--to keep us nudged in generally the right direction. We have a lot of leeway and we can break through the boundary if we insist.

The concept of a pre-horizon matches up more closely with the Old Testament than the traditional concept of predestination as history is a done deal. For instance, when Jeremiah is sent to the potter's house he watches the potter attempt to make a pot. The clay does not co-operate, so he mashes it down and has another go at it. If our destiny were fixed, the potter wouldn't have to have another go at us. God has a plan for us, but if we don't obey, He has another plan. He keeps working with us. This little anecdote of Jeremiah's is followed up by a series of "if/then" statements God makes...if you do this, I will do that. There are several of those in Deuteronomy (I think) where He says "if you will obey then I will bless you when you go out and when you come in..." but "if you disobey then..." a lot of really unpleasant things will happen.

When God notices Cain is about to lose his temper, He sidles up to him and tells him, "Won't you be accepted if you do the right thing?" If Cain's future was a done deal, then why would God bother with that? Just so He can point out to him later, even though Cain couldn't choose differently, that he was a rat? That's just torture.

The Old Testament is full of "Choose you this day whom you will serve" statements, Joshua's admonition being one of the most memorable. And what about Jonah? Jonah didn't want to go to Nineveh, he tried to run away, but God's fence or boundary came in the form of a large fish that swallowed him and held him in its belly until he decided to do what he was told. He preached to the Ninevehites, but he didn't want them to repent, he wanted God to zap them. There's no point to the story if the Ninevehites' future was a done deal.

I know I'm largely going against the mainstream Protestant theology on this, but the more I've thought about it, studied and prayed about it over the past year the more convinced I am that God doesn't know the future as a done deal.

First, the only things that exist are the things He has spoken. If He hasn't spoken it, it doesn't exist. The entire universe was created by this method--believe, speak and then receive. In Mark Jesus cursed the fig tree then He told His disciples, "You shall have what you say," (all of these Scripture references are my paraphrase). Essentially, God has given human beings the power to work together with Him to shape the future--it's not a done deal!

God has only spoken a few prophecies about the future, those things will happen. Nothing can stop them because they have been spoken, but not all of history has been spoken--the rest of it is wide open. Those things that have been spoken are boundaries. Satan cannot press beyond those boundaries. When those triggers are flipped, when things begin to happen as predicted, when the event horizon closes in, God's fences will hold and history will take the course He has spoken.

A God who is active and lively in history matches up more closely with the God I have met in the Bible as opposed to the Deist God who is the clockmaker who creates the clock then just lets it run. The Deist concept of God is a logical result of the Calvinist interpretation of predestination--that the future is a done deal. The Deist concept of God is a dry, distant God who basically just watches from afar. That's not the God I know. The God I know is interested in helping me pick out what I'm going to wear to church tomorrow, interested in advising me on a route to town, interested in discussing what to serve for lunch. And, to my discredit, I've not done everything He's advised me to do. Sometimes the consequences for that failing are not very pleasant.

As a parent, I know my kids pretty well. But though I can probably predict a lot of what they'll do, I don't know precisely what they'll do every moment. I advise them. I'm disappointed when they don't take my advice, but I keep working with them to guide them in the right direction. That's how it is with God and His children.

One point of view would be the Father knew, but Jesus didn't know. Jesus emptied Himself of His Kingly rights to come to earth and become a Man in order to pay for sin. He emptied Himself to the point where He became a helpless baby born to a teenage mother and a reluctant step father in a barn. How much more vulnerable can the King of the Universe make Himself than that? He had to learn how to do everything, even be potty trained. He is the Word Made Flesh. He was spoken into Mary just like the artists of the middles ages portrayed the event. As the Word Made Flesh what He would be in the Incarnation was limited to what was spoken into Mary because that is what the Word did in obedience to the Father in order to become a Man, in order that He might pay the price for the first man's sin.

The Jewish bridegroom, having proposed to the bride, cannot go and fetch her until his father says the house is ready. Jesus told His disciples, "I go to prepare a place for you." And incidentally, the bread and the wine are the marriage proposal. In old Jewish times the potential groom would visit the bride and offer her bread and wine. If she drank the wine and ate the bread that meant she would marry him. The Lord's Supper is essentially us accepting Jesus' proposal of marriage. Now, He has gone to prepare a place for us and when the Father says the House is ready--that could mean both our Heavenly mansions or the "House" as in the Church of which Jesus is the Chief Cornerstone--then He will return for us. When will this Day occur? Not until the moment when the Father says it's ready.

We are co-operatively working with God on that objective. God created us little "g" gods, endowing us with godly powers of speech, mathematics, music, art, story telling, free will and the power to speak things into existence--to shape our futures by what we do now. Jesus quotes Psalm 82 in John 10 in a verbal sparring battle with the Pharisees. Essentially Jesus says, "God has declared human beings to be gods, so how can I be blasphemous when I say I'm God, when you also are gods?" You read Psalm 82 and the picture is God as the Overking [residing over an assembly of little "g" gods, that's us, who are basically screw-ups in the god-business. The god-business is to love others as we love ourselves. God created us god-class beings, in His Image, after His Likeness. We have as much responsibility for what tomorrow holds, if not more, than He does because He gave the earth to us and told us to have dominion over it. Meanwhile, He sets up boundaries, fences on the horizon and keeps nudging us to do the right thing.

God is I AM. God is Light, I John 1:5. I AM is NOW. In Light now is incredibly long. In NOW God knows everything. He knows what every bit of matter in the entire universe is doing right now. He knows how every cell in your body is doing, He knows how every cell in every body, plant, animal or human is doing. He knows which are about to go cancerous, which are about to make a new hair grow, which are becoming inflamed...the Omniscience on that level alone boggles my mind. He knows exactly what every thinking creature in the entire universe is thinking right now. He knows what each is thinking and why better than any of those creatures know. He knows what every human being is feeling and why better than each of us can possibly know even of our own selves. He hears, understand and comprehends totally every single conversation going on right now. All simultaneously while listening to prayers too. But the future--unless someone has spoken it, and we have a limited version of the ability to speak things into existence--it doesn't exist yet. There is no future to know--except for the prophecies God has spoken and the future each of us is presently speaking right now.

God is I AM. He is IN NOW. Jesus was so attentive to every person He met because He was so totally in now. We are not so totally in now. Someone is speaking to us and we're wondering if he knows he has a zit on his face or we're thinking of our response instead of really listening. We are sitting on the edge of the Grand Canyon and we're thinking of what's for lunch! If Jesus were to sit on the edge of the Grand Canyon, He would be totally there enjoying every color, scent and sound. Now is a vast place when one is fully in it. And in Light, now stretches. This is the place where God is. Trying to comprehend what now is like for Him is giving me a headache.

When I read the passages in Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28 where God describes how His anointed cherub went bad and became satan, the verses cover a lot of time as if it only took a couple of moments. This is what time is like for God. And because He knows all of us so well, and this includes all the animals too because they play their role in the universe, the near future is clear to Him, but ten years from now, not so much--it's not NOW. The farther away from now the less of it has been spoken, the less of it has been shaped by what's going on now.

Jesus made the true and accurate statement, "only the Father knows" because He was not IN the Father at that moment in the way He had been IN the Father before He was born a Human. We are IN Christ now, but it is nothing like what it will be like when we are in Heaven! Does this mean that we are less IN Christ now? No, not really, it means we're veiled in this flesh, bound to a material world. We are like little kids in a tent inside the house. We are in the house, but we don't really know what the living room looks like even though we are in it.

Another point of view: Jesus' coming to earth was such a pivot of history, God's intervention into humanity that set up a whole new configuration. From Jesus comes a entirely new mindset which had never existed before in human thought. From this mindset we get science, capitalism, the idea that the common man is just as valid and significant as the king, the American type of government, the idea that slavery is bad, the idea that schools should exist where children learn how to read so they can come to know God through the Bible (which is the foundational idea for public schools in the western world), a whole slew of ideas that never existed before Jesus spoke them.

God could see an event horizon in which these things would begin to form and transform humanity--but did He see that moment when all the things He had spoken would finally come to fruition and He could turn to His Son and say, "Ok, go fetch your bride"? Did the Father know before the Son came to earth when the Son would eventually return? Since Jesus did not say a time, apparently the Father didn't know it before Jesus was spoken into Mary or Jesus would have known it too.

So, the answer is either the Father didn't know yet or that knowledge was one of the things the Son emptied Himself of when He came to planet earth. The idea that this statement proves He isn't God is silly.

1) Jesus said, "Before Abraham was, I AM," John 8:58, and declared in that moment He was God. Muslims say that Jesus has to say "I am God" before they'll believe. Well, Jesus said it, so there.
2) Josephus, a Jewish historian alive at the time, wrote that there was this Rabbi called Yeshua who had a great following; He was crucified and His disciples claimed He was raised from the dead. Jesus is a real historical figure who really lived on planet earth.
3) Jesus' disciples were martyred, all except John, for preaching Jesus was the Son of God and raised from the dead. A man will not die for something he knows is a lie.
4) Since Jesus rose from the dead, He must be God.

Sincerely,

Marilyn